AIM: To examine the clinicopathologic features of elderly patients with gastric

AIM: To examine the clinicopathologic features of elderly patients with gastric carcinoma and to investigate the relationship between prognosis and age. multiple carcinomas were found in 14/194 (7.2%) of the elderly group and 4/137 (2.9%) of the young group (46.5%, = 0.5290). Multivariate analysis showed that this histologic type, nodal involvement and operative curability were significant prognostic factors, and age itself was not an independent prognostic factor of survival for elderly gastric carcinoma patients. CONCLUSION: Elderly patients with gastric carcinoma do not have a worse prognosis than young patients. The important prognostic factor is usually whether the patients undergo a curative resection. values less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. RESULTS Table ?Table11 summarizes the clinicopathologic findings of gastric carcinoma in elderly patients. Of the 2 2 014 patients, 194 (9.6%) aged more than 70 years were classified as elderly patients. There were 131 males and 63 females, the gender ratio was 2.1:1. The age of the patients at the time of the initial diagnosis ranged from 70 to 83 years, with a mean age of 73.3 years. Of the 2 2 014 patients, 137 (6.8%) aged less than 36 years were classified as young patients. There were 63 males and 74 females, the gender ratio was 0.85:1. Table 1 Clinicopathologic features of gastric carcinoma in the elderly and young patients. The mean tumor size was smaller in elderly patients (5.16 5.07 cm) with gastric carcinoma, but the difference was not statistically significant (8.3%, 6.6%, value was <0.001 and the relative risk was 3.077 when the observed value was curative resection or non-curative resection. Multivariate analysis also showed that age itself was not an independent prognostic factor of survival for the elderly gastric carcinoma patients (Table ?(Table3).3). The 5-12 months survival rates of the young and elderly patients did not differ statistically (52.8% 46.5%, = 0.5290) (Figure ?(Figure1A).1A). The 5-12 months survival rates of young and elderly patients with curative resection did not differ statistically (67.0% 60.0%, = 0.3100) (Figure ?(Figure1B).1B). The elderly patients with curatively resected gastric carcinoma had a better survival rate than the elderly patients with non-curatively resected gastric carcinoma (60.0% 6.5%, 6.5%; 63), and this result is compatible with other reports[9,14]. We found synchronous multiple carcinomas of the stomach in 7.2% (14/191) of the elderly patients and Sanggenone D IC50 this rate was significantly higher than that in the young patients (2.9%, 19.7%). Gastrectomy in combination with lymphadenectomy is the only potentially curative modality for localized gastric carcinomas. In accordance with most literature reports[3,9-11,16-20], curative resection offers the only chance of long-term survival. Nevertheless, Katai et al[21] concluded that the extent of surgery should be considered, especially as total gastrectomy and extended node dissection were associated with higher operative mortalities. Many investigators have reported a low curative resection rate in elderly patients with gastric carcinoma[12,22,23]. In our series, however, the curative resection rate (80.9%) in the elderly group is much higher than previously reported in Western countries. Otani et al[4] reported that surgery should not be avoided based solely on the age of patients. On the contrary, Iguchi et al[24] recommended the less extensive gastric surgery for the very old patients with gastric carcinoma to improve their quality of life. We performed gastrectomy Sanggenone D IC50 with D2 lymph node dissection in elderly patients with advanced gastric carcinoma who had no other medical illnesses, such as cardiovascular or respiratory problems. In this study, the 5-12 months survival rates of the Sanggenone D IC50 elderly and young patients did not differ statistically (46.5% 52.8%). Rabbit Polyclonal to HSP105 The elderly patients with curatively resected gastric carcinoma had a better survival rate than those with non-curatively resected gastric carcinoma Sanggenone D IC50 (68.1% 6.5%). On the contrary, others[5,21,24,25] reported that this survival rates of the elderly.